Towering nearly 6,000 metres above the Yukon Territory, Mount Logan is the highest mountain in Canada, and the second-highest in North America. For ice core scientist and National Geographic explorer Alison Criscitiello, peaks like Logan – and the centuries-old ice they contain – hold the clues to understanding our climate’s past and, consequently, its future.
That’s why, in the summer of 2022 as part of the Perpetual Planet Expeditions partnership between the National Geographic Society and Rolex, Criscitiello and a team of scientists and mountaineers spent nearly three weeks braving sub-zero temperatures, altitude sickness, and 150 km/h winds to extract ice core samples from Logan’s peak.
The expedition is chronicled in For Winter, a documentary that premiered in October at the 2024 Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival. In addition to revealing the lengths that ice-core scientists like Criscitiello must go to expand this vital area of human knowledge, the film also stands as a testament how hard she has worked to defy expectations about gender and diversity. “The higher you go, the fewer women you find,” says Criscitiello, a mother of two who faced discrimination while working as a climbing ranger and mountain guide before earning the first PhD in ice core science from MIT. “The film’s goals are around staying in the climate change fight at this unbelievably critical moment and diversifying the people who are in that fight because diverse groups do better science.”
As the Director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, Criscitiello is one of around 300 ice core scientists in the world. Unlike other areas of climate science, where samples can be drawn from air, soil, and water, ice core scientists must venture to some of the most inhospitable places on the planet, usually toting drilling rigs weighing hundreds of kilograms, to extract ice cores from deep beneath the surface. “The non-polar, high mountain regions in the world are like the oceans; it’s just this huge undiscovered part of our knowledge in terms of climate records,” Criscitiello says. “It’s hard to get there and it’s hard to do, both physically and otherwise, but it’s so important to reconstruct these climate records from very hard-to-reach places where we have knowledge gaps.”
During the expedition, Criscitiello and her team spent 10 days climbing to Logan’s peak, and another 11 days camped out at the summit, battling altitude sickness while operating the 400-kg ice drill for 14 hours each day. The mountain took its toll, forcing three of her seven-person team to be extracted by helicopter with serious health issues, but the expedition was ultimately successful, yielding surprising data that contradicts previous research. “An enormous amount of what we know about climate variability in the North Pacific was based on the old record being dated correctly, so this has thrown a whole bunch of science up in the air all at once,” Criscitiello says.
For Criscitiello, studying ice cores is an ideal way to combine her love of mountaineering and science, but she’s candid about the challenges of spending time away from her wife and two young daughters, Winter and Juniper. “I go into the field almost as much as I used to, but I have to force myself. It’s something I never thought I would struggle with,” she says. “But [my children] have made it more personal. It feels critical to keep doing what I’m doing.”
Watch the trailer for For Winter below.
